ALBANY, N.Y. >> If he didn’t already have a job, you might think New York Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie was running for governor.

The Bronx Democrat has crisscrossed the state over several weeks this summer, making stops in Rochester, Ithaca, Syracuse, the North Country and points in between. Heastie said the trips are part of an effort to better understand the challenges and opportunities facing the entire state.

The speaker’s road trips — unusual for a downstate politician — also help to shore up his support among upstate Democrats and serve as a challenge to Republicans who have long criticized what they say is New York City’s indifference to the plight of struggling cities such as Utica, Binghamton and Buffalo.

“I made this commitment to my upstate colleagues. I want to get past this perception that there’s an upstate-downstate divide,” Heastie told The Associated Press by telephone on Wednesday from Rochester, in between a visit to a local health clinic and a meeting with an anti-poverty task force. “And I wanted to learn.”

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Heastie was little known around the state when he won a five-way contest to succeed Sheldon Silver in February, during an especially turbulent time in Albany.

Silver, a Manhattan Democrat who led the Assembly for two decades, was charged with taking nearly $4 million in kickbacks. A few months later, Senate Leader Dean Skelos, a Long Island Republican, was charged with extortion and solicitation of bribes. Both men resigned their leadership positions but are keeping their legislative seats as they fight the charges.

It was a difficult time to take over as a legislative leader, and Heastie’s first steps were cautious. His first press conference as speaker lasted only two minutes before an aide abruptly ended it. After reporters complained, Heastie returned to answer a few more questions. Six months and one difficult legislative session later, he’s grown into the role, cheerfully fielding questions from reporters at each of his upstate visits.

“No matter how much the media badgers you, you can’t be rattled,” said Assemblywoman Crystal Peoples-Stokes, a Buffalo Democrat who joined Heastie for his visit to that city last month. She said she can’t recall Silver ever doing a similar upstate tour. “He came up for ribbon cuttings. But to go and sit down and listen to my constituents and their concerns — it’s invaluable for him as a leader.”

Republicans have noted that Heastie’s visits tend to be to areas represented by upstate Democrats — and that he hasn’t spent as much time in GOP strongholds.

“He needs to really reach out to both majority and minority members to get a true picture of what’s going on,” Assembly Minority Leader Brian Kolb, R- Canandaigua, said on “Capital Tonight” on Time Warner Cable News.

The trip highlights the big differences between New York City and the rest of the state, where cities such as Utica and Buffalo have lost roughly half of their populations as the local economy sputtered and manufacturing plants closed. For much of the state’s history New York City leaders have complained of interference by Albany while upstate residents protested New York City’s outsized influence.

“The upstate-downstate divide is one of the oldest features of the state’s political system, said University of Rochester political scientist Gerald Gamm. “What the speaker is going to see (upstate) is that the challenges facing upstate are in many ways fundamentally different than those facing New York City, Long Island and the suburbs.”

Heastie’s visits have included stops at an auto plant near Buffalo, dairy farms in central New York, a Utica hospital, an elementary school in Ithaca, Fort Drum and SUNY Binghamton. In Buffalo, he also met with members of the Restore Our Community Coalition, a group working to restore an area of the city that was cut in half when the Kensington Expressway was built more than 50 years ago.

“This was huge for us,” said the group’s executive director, Karen Stanley Fleming. “The expressway totally tore our community apart. It’s important to get an eyewitness account to understand it though. He’s the highest level official we’ve met with.”